These ParkSeed tomato seeds were sent to space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984 as part of NASA’s Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) project. LDEF carried dozens of experiments from many different disciplines, among them ParkSeed’s tomato seeds, designed to study the effects of deep space on seeds. They remained in space for five years, until the Columbia Shuttle Mission STS-32 returned the seeds to Earth in 1989, before being sent around the country—to more than forty thousand schools, involving more than three million students—for one of the largest science experiments ever. NASA analyzed the students’ findings, which indicated that the space tomatoes were as healthy as their Earth-based siblings and even “tastier, juicier and sweeter!”

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